How to fix the healer problem.

[BunnyQueen]

These suggestions seem unusual and strange to me. Maybe they would work? But they aren't what I would say, as someone that has played since ARR.

To make healers relevant in, say, a dungeon, the answer is simply to not allow tanks to heal themselves to the degree that a Warrior can and to make sure bosses and enemies hit hard with autos/DoTs/vulns.

How do I know this? Because I played in Heavensward where you would go through a dungeon and, generally, relied on the healer. Getting through it was a partnership between the tank doing good mit, the healer keeping them alive and the DPS killing things before the tank ran out of cooldowns.

What has changed since then:

• Tanks have an abundance of self-heals.
• Tanks have a powerful short-cooldown mit, the 30% mit had its CD reduced, Reprisal became AoE, we got Arm's Length.
• Tanks got extremely good AoE so mob packs don't last an eternity in an average party of not-competent DPS.
• Bosses spend so much time doing mechs they don't do hard-hitting autos.
• Healers have lots of OGCD heals so they don't need to actually cast a heal.

That said:

• I always spammed my attacks on a healer, even in ARR and Heavensward.
• Healing was still often just apply regens on WHM -> DPS -> Benediction if needed.
• Although healing was like that even then, it was a lot more risky than it is now, and clearly going against the design intention. The difference now is SE decided to design around how we actually play healers.

Tanks are way too overtuned at this point, and bloated AF.

[Hyperia]

Tank design is a part of the problem in raids and dungeons because they have so much kit and the boss tank busters hit for so little it’s sad. I remember when a tank buster ment that if they didn’t use their mits and get big heals fast, there dead.

Now all the tank busters are for me is put my WHM mits on them, a regen and back to mindless dps spam.

Strange as it sounds, it’s actually nice when people stand in the fires or get the wall bleeds, at least it gives me something to heal.

I feel like we are battle hardened trauma doctors that only get to put bandaids on paper cuts. Why did I go to med school (level to 100 and gear up) for this?

[BunnyQueen]

Tank design is a part of the problem in raids and dungeons because they have so much kit and the boss tank busters hit for so little it’s sad. I remember when a tank buster ment that if they didn’t use their mits and get big heals fast, there dead.

Now all the tank busters are for me is put my WHM mits on them, a regen and back to mindless dps spam.

Strange as it sounds, it’s actually nice when people stand in the fires or get the wall bleeds, at least it gives me something to heal.

I feel like we are battle hardened trauma doctors that only get to put bandaids on paper cuts. Why did I go to med school (level to 100 and gear up) for this?

The healer problem has gotten to the point where any friends of mine who join and go healer either quit the game late stormblood or switch roles because healer feels that bad.

[CaptainLagbeard]

The real way you fix healers is making them more fun to play.

Healers are given too much downtime with literally nothing to do with said downtime.
Some think they should be given less downtime, some think they should be able to do damage in that downtime.

But currently, we just have practically nothing.

[Tunda]

1- Increase damage taken to tanks.

2- Buff healers heals

[Chiru_Kai]

Healer problems are easily solved by giving problems to players that can't be solved by just adding more tanks.

More punishing mechanics need to become a regular mechanic that is added in at some point during fights.
- Kefka-like Doom Raidwides: everyone's HP is dropped to 1. Also get a doom debuff that is cleansed when reaching full HP. If not full HP at the end of the debuff timer, you die. Goes through invulnerability, of course. Can make non-lethal variants of this debuff for normal content, but the resulting consequence should be enough that it's just always preferable to have a healer.
- Throttle debuffs on all non-healers. Must be cleansed with Esuna. If not cleansed, you die.
- Powerful bleeds and armor-reduction debuffs, all solved by having a healer output some more healing.

Then you can do a gamewide patch:
- All tank and dps skills and abilities that provide healing or shielding is changed into some form of damage reduction for themselves, or a self-buff to increase damage. They can take a beating, but they can't survive forever.
Let healers heal and be the ONLY source of healing. Just like tanks are the only role able to survive tankbusters reliably and/or use invulnerabilities. Healing should be a unique trait that is only done by healers.
- Automatic self-healing is removed entirely in extremes, savages, and ultimates.


There, now you made healers more in demand.
The weaklings will complain that "omg but this means a bad healer can ruin the whole party "... and yes.... so what? A bad DPS will never let the party clear. A bad tank will let themselves die, then their co-tank, and then the whole party. Stop coddling healers. Give this class the power fantasy it deserves.

[Raven2014]

You know there is an extremely easy way to fix tank? Make the boss auto more and harder. First, the boss shouldn't pause their auto when cast abilities, and tank damage shouldn't be simply heal with AOE heal. You notice this a lot during parts where there is no AOE damage and heal, and the damage tanks taken from auto is very noticable. But most of the time, whatever AOE heal used for raid while will also easily cover the tank that you don't even notice.


Second, there should be enough sustain damage on the tank that they would oblige to use the smaller CD (like rampart) outside of buster, while saving bigger CD (i.e Sentinel) for the bigger head. Right now tanks can just save and kitchen sink their CD that would make most buster trivial. For example, one tank can actually just kitchen sink and solo the "SHARED" buster in M3S without invul ... that shouldn't be possible. TBN struggle to break half of the time because sustain damage on tank is so low ... that shouldn't be a thing.


Also, EVERY raid boss should do either shared auto cleave, or hitting both MT and OT at the same time. Right now most of the time the OT is just a DPS wanna be playing with tank privilege. I find it somewhat commical that half of the time in PF some tanks don't want to MT because they never MT. The tree boss (P7S) was one of the best boss in recent memory that I think does a fair amount of damage to both tanks, and even that I think was still pretty lenient. Comparing to that the majority of the bosses are just extremely soft on tanks.

[Mr_Gyactus]

Right now the only roulette in need of healers is the Alliance raid, and all the others are looking for tanks.

Maybe the players want to play without responsibility, and for this reason they play dps, possibly the simplest ones.

My guess eh.

[Banriikku]

Healer fix = DPS-Kit for healer. They dont want to change their design, so dps it is. Simple. Everything in this game is designed around dance like fights and dps. There is no space for "more healing" or "healing mechanics". I would like to have that but the design is what it is and without change only the DPS-kit is possible.

[sindriiisgaming]

Bunny queen is just as pissed as I am. We pay a sub for this shit and deserve quality control. Worste case the devs make healers into black mages, who cares,? We need functionality not this class identity bullshit. Identity doesn't mean I can clear content comfortably.

its almost like your paying for a product you're no longer happy with :sip: